Doors, The: Waiting For The Sun (Vinyl LP)

1968's Waiting For The Sun, the Doors' first chart-topper, delivered the #1 signature smash "Hello, I Love You" and the Top 40 hit "The Unknown Soldier".

This was the album which was due to feature 'Celebration of the Lizard' - Jim Morrison's eagerly-awaited 10-minute poem written in tribute to said sexy reptile. Alas though, it wasn't to be. Instead they inserted less ambitious oldie 'Hello I Love You' at the last minute and hoped that no-one would mind. Unsurprisingly, it sticks out like a sore thumb on a set which represents the peak of Jim Morrison's belief that he was some kind of leather-trousered shaman. Were this not a '60s rock group, such acts of narcotic delusion might signal disaster.

Narcotic delusion though, was what '60s rock groups did best - and here's an album full of it: the elegiac piano inflections that frame 'Yes the River Knows'; the warped, disembodied 'Not to Touch the Earth' and that oft-overlooked pagan sea-shanty 'My Wild Love'. Indeed, only 'The Unknown Soldier' and 'Five to One' serve to remind the listener that this was an album recorded at the peak of the Vietnam war - the latter lyric, of course, spawning the title of Morrison's best-selling biography 'No-One Here Gets Out Alive'.

1. Roadhouse Blues
2. Waiting for the Sun
3. You Make Me Real
4. Peace Frog
5. Blue Sunday
6. Ship of Fools
7. Land Ho!
8. The Spy
9. Queen of the Highway
10. Indian Summer
11. Maggie M'Gill